Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Oil: BP Cheap Parts Shortcuts Ignored Safety for Profits, Food & Corporations Rule the World

Tags: Oil: BP Cheap Parts Shortcuts Ignored Safety for Profits, Food & Corporations Rule the World

Oil: BP Cheap Parts Shortcuts Ignored Safety in Favor of Increased Profits McClatchy Newspapers Erika Bolstad Monday June 14, 2010 http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/14/95836/congress-bp-made-risky-decisions.html

Most of you who paid close attention already know that BP has always overwhelmingly chosen profits over safety in Alaska pipelines, in refinery explosions and fire, and in deep sea oil and gas drilling rigs. Today another fire was reported on the oil recovery ship, which BP attributed to a lightning strike. They probably “forgot” to monitor natural gas leaks in their equipment.

Oil companies claim that drilling a relief pipe would be too expensive at $100 million dollars. This price can be compared to the billions of dollars of multi-years damaged done because of their negligence. We need to assume that mistakes would be made to cause these disasters so we must err on the side of safety and simplicity of operations.

Watching the testimony on C-SPAN by operators of the rig, I observed that these operations are very complex and if one person screws up, a disaster could occur. Oil companies need to simplify and increase the capability of individuals who run these rigs and a continuous safety check of operations needs to be done with regulations.

When Corporations Rule the World

Back in 1995, I picked up a bargain book for $2 by Korten called When Corporations Rule the World written by a former Harvard business school professor who spent 30 years with the Ford Foundation trying to improve their economy. He concluded that the best thing we could do is to provide funding, but don’t allow them to become profit centers for international corporations.

Now just a handful of food corporations control what most of us eat and drink. Our obesity, diabetes 2, and general poor health epidemic resulted from corporations feeding us foods stripped of fiber, nutrients, and flavor, and enhancing flavor by adding large amounts of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) because it does not crystallize on storage and freezing as regular sugar does. Another Reagan (1984) contribution when he heavily subsidized corn (HFCS) where corporations can sell corn for nothing as they did in Mexico and still make a profit.

Our metabolic system cannot tolerate high amounts of fructose contained in both regular sugar and in HFCS. Fructose cannot be used directly by our cells as glucose, so Fructose is metabolized in our liver not only to produce glucose which becomes glycogen, a stored sugar, but it also produces 30% bad cholesterol, triglycerides, fatigue. All our cells increase their fructose enzymes to metabolize excess fructose, it uses up our energy ATP in our cells and the cell dies. The DNA and materials produce purines which are then converted to Uric Acid. Get your uric acid tested. It is a cheap test which old doctors thought important. Now it is not done.

The uric acid inflames our blood vessels and reduces its ability to expand resulting in high blood pressure. Inflamed blood vessels increase plaque formation to cause heart disease. Cancer spreads to inflamed organs too! Cytokines are produced around inflammations. That is why the C-Reactive Protein Test, usually ignored by physicians, should also be obtained at least once a year. It costs the same as cholesterol tests and is probably a better indicator of possible heart disease and cancer.

Although the research is not complete yet, mice studies at Princeton University showed that mice fed equal calories of cane sugar and HFCS ate different amounts of food and the one fed HFCS gained weight because it ate more mice chow. All the mice have the same DNA genes just like identical twins, something in the metabolism of fructose causes humans and mice to also eat more, a perfect sugar for Fast Food and other restaurants. A logical hypothesis is that Leptin, the appetite suppressor, does not leave the brain as easily to signal us to stop eating, possibly due to inflamed tighter pores in brain tissue.

When I stopped drinking high fructose orange and apple juice, I was able to control my systolic blood pressure (high number) and keep it low even though I increased the amount of salt I have daily and lost ten pounds off my belly. Belly fat is the stored fat that goes down first when we have an appropriate diet. It is more what we eat than how much. More natural fiber can only be easily in non-processed food. What it does is that as long as you drink enough water, the fiber greatly helps us from becoming constipated which increases our weight because more nutrients are taken in, the longer food sits in our intestines.

A fairly simple book to read that I recommend highly is The Sugar Fix: The High-Fuctose Fallout that is making You Fat and Sick, by Richard J. Johnson, MD with Timothy Gower who is a good writer. Dr. Johnson is a Kidney doctor and wanted to find out how to prevent diabetes 2, the leading cause of kidney failure. His research reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association and other peer reviewed journals shows clearly that we can believe what Dr Johnson tells us.

The corporations now control just about everything we do and it got a lot worse under CEOs Bush and Cheney. The damage they did to our country has been both obvious and not so obvious. Every week President Obama encounters another unexpected problem due to a change in both laws and regulations and installing incompetents in our government Civil Service system. They even fired federal top Republican prosecutors who did not break the laws to do what was politically expected in elections by fraudulently charging Democrats with a crime just before an election.

To show even more blatantly that this court is in the pockets of corporations came from this decision a few days ago. The Supreme Court action to allow corporations to spend any amount of money to influence elections and the recent unsigned edict by our Supreme Court to stop the public funding of elections in Arizona was so unreal that I had to check the news to see this really happened. Yes, it did!

Jim Kawakami, June 15, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Oil: BP Cheap Parts Shortcuts Ignored Safety in Favor of Increased Profits

WASHINGTON — BP knew its Macondo well was troublesome in the days leading up to a fatal April 20 blowout, congressional investigators found, but the company "appears to have made multiple decisions for economic reasons that increased the danger of a catastrophic well failure."

From the company's uncommon well design to its fatal decision not to circulate drilling mud, which could have cleared out pockets of gas, and the lack of critical testing, which could have pinpointed problems with its cementing, the company had many points at which it could have prevented an explosion, investigators with the House Energy and Commerce Committee have found.

Instead, the company violated industry guidelines and proceeded "despite warnings from BP's own personnel and its contractors," said the chairman of the committee, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and the chairman of the investigative subcommittee that handled the probe, Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich.

Those decisions led to 11 deaths and the worst oil spill in U.S. history and will continue to have an effect on the environment and the future of offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, the two wrote in a letter to BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward that was released Monday.

"Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense," they wrote. "If this is what happened, BP's carelessness and complacency have inflicted a heavy toll on the Gulf, its inhabitants and the workers on the rig." Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/14/95836/congress-bp-made-risky-decisions.html#ixzz0qwzqa8u0

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